Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos called the series of recent FARC attacks “cowardly” and said that the guerrillas will not be permitted to achieve their objective of interrupting the reparations process.
Santos said that these “terrorist” acts have only confirmed that the FARC do not have the capacity to confront the Colombian armed forces.
“They have resorted to the [kind] of terrorist attacks carried out by one or two people. And then in one town they launch a grenade or carry out an attack with a machine gun, and leave running, because they don’t have the capacity to confront the public forces.”
“What happened yesterday, one child dead, various civilians gravely injured by terrorist attacks, that is a cowardly attack, and the only thing it does is to generate what they want: unease, terror among the population, but in this way they will not get anywhere,” said the president on Tuesday.
Santos added that, as much as the country’s extreme left (referring to the FARC) is damaging the country’s peace and reparations process, so is the extreme right wing — those who don’t want land restitution to occur or “want to exaggerate the insecurity in order to say: this country is in chaos” — but that the two wings will not achieve their objectives of “breaking the optimism in the country, because the country knows we are headed down a good road.”
On Monday, one child died and a total of at least 23 were injured in two separate incidents in the country’s southwest Nariño department. In the first incident, a bomb carried by one child, allegedly given to him by the FARC, exploded killing him and injuring at least eight others, while a FARC attack later in the evening in the nearby town of El Charco injured 15 civilians.
Local media registered three other FARC attacks, one in Tolima, one in Huila and one in Cauca less than 24 hours before the two attacks in Nariño.
Other attacks include two situations in the Caqueta department earlier Tuesday morning, in the course of which two civilians were reported dead and eight injured, in two separate FARC attacks in the Puerto Rico municipality. The attacks occurred less than 30 miles from San Vicente del Caguan, where last week alleged guerrillas kidnapped four Chinese oil workers.